Stakeholders

How different people are involved

A workshop involves more people than the ones on the call, and knowing who is involved and how shapes both the design and what you can actually do with the output.

Stakeholders are everyone with a stake in the session: participants, facilitators, the client or commissioning organisation, sponsors, decision-makers who will act on the output, and anyone else whose buy-in or involvement affects whether the session achieves anything.

Online workshops often involve stakeholders who are invisible during the session itself: a manager who asked for it but will not attend, a technical team whose buy-in the output needs, a budget holder who will decide whether the recommendations go anywhere. Mapping those people early affects how you design the session and how you frame the outputs.

Involvement does not mean attendance. Some stakeholders need to be consulted before the session to frame it correctly. Some need to be informed of the outcomes afterward. Some need to be in the room but not leading it. Knowing who is who prevents the common situation where a well-run session produces output that goes nowhere because the wrong people were in the room.

Online, specificallyOnline it is easy for key stakeholders to be entirely absent from the process, since there is no physical event to attend, so you need to be more deliberate about mapping who needs what and making sure they are included or informed at the right point.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Map everyone early

Good facilitators list all stakeholders before the design starts: who needs to be there, who needs to be consulted beforehand, who needs to receive the output, and who needs to approve action on it.

Brief decision-makers separately

They identify any stakeholders whose buy-in the output needs but who will not attend the session, and plan a brief or a follow-up communication specifically for them, so the session output does not stall.

Be clear about roles on the call

They establish in advance who is a participant, who is a facilitator, and who is an observer, and communicate those roles to everyone. Ambiguity about roles confuses the session and reduces participation.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Who are all the stakeholders in this workshop, including those who will not be in the session itself?
Which stakeholders need to be consulted before the session to ensure it is framed correctly?
Who needs to receive the session output, and in what form, for anything to happen as a result?
Are there any stakeholders whose absence from the session will limit what the output can achieve?
How are participant, facilitator, and observer roles assigned and communicated to everyone?

What trips people up online

Running a workshop without the right decision-making authority in the room, or without a plan to reach those people afterward, produces outputs that sit in a document and go nowhere.
Observers on a remote call who are not clearly introduced can make participants uncomfortable or change the dynamics of the discussion in ways that undermine the session.
Not briefing key stakeholders beforehand means the session sometimes produces the right answer to the wrong question.